Category Archives: AECT Standard 5 (Research)

Over the past three weeks, I have begun exploring theories of educational technology in conjunction with general learning theories. What I have discovered is that educational theory has its basis in the primary learning theories, but it seeks to explain not only how we can learn using technology, but how technology is changing the very nature of our learning. De Castall, Bryson, and Jenson (2002) indicate that we currently have a theory of educational technology which “takes for granted…the integration of education and technology,” but that we do not have an educational theory of technology which would “investigate technology from the standpoint of educational values and purposes.” An educational theory of technology would rethink “educational epistemology” and look at how technology is changing our learning. Lankshear, Peters, and Knobel (2000) argue something similar and show how the Internet has changed how we learn.

Lanshear, Peters, and Knobel reference Gilster who has described a five-step process for knowledge assembly using the Internet. These five steps include: subscribing to a news service, subscribing to newsgroups and mailing lists, searching the Internet for background information, accessing other Internet sources to “verify or disconfirm” (p. 30) information, and relating the information obtained to traditional non-networked sources such as television, conventional newspapers, library resources, etc. To me, this process of learning is similar to discovery learning. The learner takes a topic in which she is interested and approaches it from as many angles as possible to gather accurate, credible information. This is a process I plan to have my students follow with a project I designed recently. Students will construct knowledge through extensive research, learn to write a proposal, and present their proposal with limited direction from me. I will offer support materials, but students will approach and assimilate the information on their own. However, because I have studied Bruner’s explanation of discovery learning, I realize that before I put students on this path, I will need to ensure that they have the foundational skills necessary to learn on their own.

An additional item I learned from De Castell, Bryson, and Jenson is that in the new media world, information has become a commodity and due to a lack of an educational theory of technology, schools have become glutted with mass-produced instructional delivery systems that do not necessarily take into account learning theories or actual student needs. In the drive to be the best, or to add value to a student’s education, schools purchase these systems without really evaluating their claims. I have seen this in my own school. We recently purchased a reading intervention program because of the hype surrounding it, and we have found that is meets the needs of very few students. It was not created for the complexity of issues our students face in reading comprehension. I have been guilty of this as a teacher, I see a program that sounds like a panacea for all my students learning issues and I investigate. Unfortunately, these packaged, mass-distributed programs only benefit the technology industry.

Resources

Bruner, J. (1979). The act of discovery. In Bruner, J. On knowing: Essays for the left hand (pp. 81-96). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press (Original work published 1962).

Over the past 3 weeks I have had the opportunity to analyze my school’s technology plan. This was a difficult assignment because I have always been frustrated by my school’s lack of technology, or a real plan to acquire and use it, but the other teachers and administrators at my school, have been proud of how much technology we have. When I moved here from Idaho 10 years ago. the school I had been student teaching at had the same number of students at my current school. It also had 5 or 6 open computer labs and 5 or 6 classroom labs. Teacher computers were replaced every three years. I couldn’t understand why the situation was so different in my new district in California until I understood the demographics. 70% of the students at my school are on free or reduced lunch. That’s much larger than the school I was at in Idaho.

Regardless of income, a school can and should have a plan. I was embarrassed to look at my school’s plan, especially because I’m on the technology team, because there isn’t really a plan. California now ties funding to LCAP plans. Those plans include a technology plan and the state department of education has requirements about what a technology plan has to look like. My school’s plan looks nothing like that. It is really truly a list, with items crossed out and in different colored ink. We have a lot of work to do. I plan to mention our lack of a real plan at our technology team meeting this week. I’m not sure I’ll be very popular when I point out that we need to create a formal plan and invite parents and students to give input. If we don’t do those things, we can’t move forward.

This week I completed an APA Annotated Bibliography assignment. I decided to focus my research on flipping the classroom, since I have been looking at ways to do it for the past couple of years. One difficulty I’ve had with flipping my classroom is that there isn’t much guidance out there for doing it in a language arts class. I follow a couple of high school teachers on YouTube and I check their blogs, but other than that I couldn’t find much. Sad to say, that has not changed much. For this assignment we had to find peer-reviewed journal articles. I found hundreds of articles on flipping the classroom, but almost all of them were college-level science or applied arts classes, or they were from conferences. We were supposed to find 5 articles; I have found 4 relevant ones and one slightly relevant, but heavily researched, one.

I enjoyed using Google Scholar. I wish it had existed when I did my undergrad degrees. It would have made my research for political science, Italian literature, English literature, and education classes much more enjoyable. While I still had to verify that the articles were from peer-reviewed journals, and find access to them, I did not have to distinguish between someone’s blog entry and someone else’s website. Google Scholar filtered the results so that everything was at least, well scholarly.

I didn’t learn much that was new about APA. I think the only new thing for me was that APA requires using past tense instead of present tense. I do not like APA, and I never have. It is too formal for my preference and the differences between it and MLA are minimal, but annoying.